I’ve been losing weight, and am becoming aquainted with my rib cage.
I noticed that one of my ribs on the left sticks out a little more than the others, but I had myself convinced that it was symmetrical, and figured that it was just due to the curvature of my ribcage.
About a month ago, my husband noticed the funny sticky-out rib, too, and I told him that it was the same on the right side. He palapted both regions throughly, and remained skeptical.
Since then I’ve dropped about another five pounds, and I was looking at myself in the mirror, and damned if you can’t see it from the outside! If I stand with my arms over my head and suck in, my normal ribs cast faint, more or less parallel shadows that run all the way around from the back to the front—and then there’s this freak rib that sticks out more at the front and creates a larger shadow And I can really feel it now. It’s very close to the lower rib margin, and I think it’s in the cartilage. It seems thicker at that point than the other ribs, but if I follow it around to my side, it seems normal.
So what the hell is this? Just an anatomical anomaly? Did I unknowingly break a rib in the past and have it heal funny on me? I can’t recall any falls in, say, the last 10 years or so, but in my younger days I certainly took plenty of spills off bikes and so forth. I don’t remember any extraordinary pain, though.
I had a chest x-ray a couple of years ago when I had a bad cold and the doctor never said, “By the way, one of your ribs is completely f’d up.”